Orchidaceae

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"Orchid" redirects here. For other uses, see Orchid (disambiguation).

Orchidaceae
Temporal range: 80–0 Ma
PreЄ Є OS D C P T J K Pg N Late Cretaceous – Recent

Colour plate from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, 1904

Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Monocots
Order: Asparagales
Family: Orchidaceae
Juss.[1]
Type genus
Orchis
Tourn. ex L.
Subfamilies
• Apostasioideae Horaninov
• Cypripedioideae Kosteletzky
• Epidendroideae Kosteletzky
• Orchidoideae Eaton
 • Vanilloideae Szlachetko

Distribution range of family Orchidaceae

The Orchidaceae are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants, with blooms that are often
colourful and fragrant, commonly known as the orchid family.
Along with the Asteraceae, they are one of the two largest families of flowering plants. The
Orchidaceae have about 28,000 currently accepted species, distributed in about 763 genera.[2][3] The
determination of which family is larger is still under debate, because verified data on the members of
such enormous families are continually in flux. Regardless, the number of orchid species nearly equals
the number of bony fishes and is more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the
number of mammal species. The family also encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.[4] The
largest genera are Bulbophyllum (2,000 species), Epidendrum (1,500 species), Dendrobium (1,400
species) and Pleurothallis (1,000 species).
The family also includes Vanilla (the genus of the vanilla plant), Orchis (type genus), and many
commonly cultivated plants such as Phalaenopsis and Cattleya. Moreover, since the introduction of
tropical species into cultivation in the 19th century, horticulturists have produced more than 100,000
hybrids and cultivars.